Have some fiction, you bastards.

Three o'clock in the morning, and my implant screams to life in my head.

"Incoming call! Incoming call! Incoming call!"

"Sleep mode!" I scream out loud to silence the buzzy voice. I really don't have to speak the commands any longer, now that the bugs have been worked out of the latest neural interface firmware. I could just think the command, but old habits die hard.

"Priority override!" screams my implant. "Incoming call! Incoming call!" I have the station's voice terminal set in my override filter, so that even in private sleep mode calls from the station can get through.

I stumble out of bed to my own terminal. "Voice only," I say. I'm still in my underwear, and I really don't want Wendy to see me sitting here half naked. "Accept."

My terminal screen flashes to life. Yep, it's Wendy, the person I least want to see at three in the morning.

"Max, signal 37. Hey, I don't see you. Are you there?"

"Yes, I'm here," I say. "Signal 37. Where is it?"

"I'm forwarding the address to your implant now. The radio traffic on this one's a mess, so this may be pretty good."

"I'll be out the door in five," I say. "End!" The image on screen collapses to standby mode.

"What's going on?" the young redhead in my bed asks. She's not a real redhead. The last natural redhead was born over seventy years ago. This one has had TGR (targeted genetic retrovirus) treatments to simulate the, um, natural redhead look, but she still can't pass the genes on to her kids.

"Where is this?" she asks, watching me pull on my pants. At the moment I'm drawing a blank on her name. Rachel, maybe? My head is throbbing. I had a lot to drink last night. So did she, which would probably explain why she's in my bed. Lately the rage among these college girls is to get drunk and fuck old men. When I was 22, girls wouldn't even look at a guy my age. Now I can't keep 'em out. As if I would want to.

"Oh, yeah," she says. "You're Mark."

"Max," I say, no longer embarrassed to have forgotten her name. I grab a hangover pill and swallow it as I reach for my shoes. By the time the laces are tied, the headache is already subsiding. Wonderful thing, those pills. I wouldn't be legal to fly right now if not for them.

Five minutes later my vest is booted and the fans are spinning up on my hovercar. I don't really need to wear the vest any more, now that I have storage implants, but old habits really do die hard after more than 80 years in this business. My second wife tried to convince me to have my access shunt removed, but I kept it. Now I plug my vest into my neck and verify that all banks are empty.

"Destination?" the car asks. I silently transfer the address from my implant to the car's navigation system. "Notice to Airmen," the car says. "Temporary Restriction in place over destination." The heads up display on the forward windscreen flickers to show the TR area superimposed over the city map.

"Transmit clearance request," I respond. "News4 Unit 7, holojournalist exemption."

"Clearance granted," the car says. "VFR flight plan filed with Arrington Approach." With that exchange, I'm able to fly anywhere the police hovers can go. It's times like these that I appreciate living in the country of California, where Freedom of the Press is still enshrined in our Third Amendment and ensured by fifty years of case law. I really don't know how newsies in the Republic of Texas or the Manhattan Protectorates can get their jobs done with such restrictions on access. Despite the pressure in those territories to simply report the government releases, they still keep trying. God bless them.

I pull up on the collective and shoot a hundred feet into the air, bank hard left and point the car toward the north end of town. Even at this low altitude I can already see the flashing red and blue emergency lights at the scene. The nose of my hovercar dips as I transition from hover to forward flight and quickly accelerate toward the column of black smoke upon which all the lights seem to be converging.

The ride is short, but it's long enough for my mind to wander. I'll be 103 years old in two weeks. As a youngster, I never thought I would live this long, much less still be working. Hell, I thought I was going to die when I had that hovercycle accident thirty years ago. A ninety foot fall that once would have ensured a certain death left me with ceramic bones and artificial muscles in my legs that are stronger and faster than anything nature could provide. Now I could leap 90 feet if the governors allowed it, but I'd probably give myself a heart attack in the process. I'm proud to say that, unlike so many of my colleagues, I still have most of my own internal organs, and my heart is still pumping as strong as when I started in this crazy business.

This business. I've seen so much change. When I first started "shooting," as they used to call it, we were just making the transition to high definition flat display technology, or HDTV, as it was known then. Dozens of acquisition formats (including tape!) appeared and went obsolete before their sales even paid for their research and development costs. Then came affordable holographic projection, and everything flat was obsolete.

Those first holocams were monsters. We had grown accustomed to HD minicams that would fit in a palm. Suddenly the cameras were back on our shoulders. BOTH shoulders, with lenses on both sides for the stereoscopic view required for holographic display. The first time I wore one, I thought somebody had put a goddamned jet pack on me.

To think we've come to the point where I can get better 3D modeling out of a unit that I can wear like a pair of old spectacles. Some of these younger kids are now actually getting ocular implants, so that they don't have to wear any external gear at all. I personally think these smaller in-the-eye cameras don't produce as good a holo, but the viewers at home don't seem to be able to tell the difference.

The biggest problem with these ocular cams isn't the holo, but the operators. The human eye naturally flits around several times per second, even when the head is perfectly still, to bring various aspects of the scene to the attention of the brain. These things were sold with the idea that the audience would be able to "see what the operator sees," literally, so that the experience would be like being there in person. The problem is that what the viewer wants to see isn't necessarily what the operator wants to see, so simply having the viewer go along for the ride is extremely disorienting. When it's projected in 3D holo, it's even more disorienting, when what might seem like a natural shift of vision when viewed from straight on suddenly becomes a sidewise rush when viewed from any other angle in the room. In other words, it's a mess.

To compensate, operators are now trained for "ten count stares," but few of them can really do it. The ten count stare involves focusing on a single point for ten seconds at a time. The operator counts to ten, then shifts his gaze to something else. Five minutes of unedited holo usually has less than a minute of usable fixed gaze, as instincts take over in between "shots" and eyes flit around as normal.

Most of us old pros still prefer the eyeglass configuration. It's simply much easier to hold your head still for ten seconds at a time than your eyes. Plus, with the larger lenses available on external units, you have much better optical zoom ratios. Read: higher quality.

My own holocam is clipped to my vest as I approach the scene. I look down through my side hatch at the devastation of another terror attack, probably by the Mexicans or Texans. It doesn't really matter which. Ever since Civil War II California (which now includes the old States of Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, and parts of Utah, Idaho and British Columbia) has been a target from Mexican nationalists from both territories. We've suffered sixty years of these attacks, dating from when Governor (and later President) Lindsay Lohan ordered all the Mexicans out during the war.

They've blown an apartment building. From the looks of it, they used conventional explosives, but the entire block is levelled. My hovercar's environmental sensors indicate no radiation. Yep, it was a good old fashioned bomb. I grab a few aerial holos from the hover, careful to avoid the shifting fire containment fields being generated by emergency management. I access my implant for the location of the command post and land a block outside the perimeter the cops have set up.

Suddenly my implant speaks up. "Incoming call!" It's Wendy.

"Status?"

"I just got here," I say.

"Do you have any word on how many victims?"

"No," I say. "I just landed. I'm headed to the command post now."

"We want to take your head live as soon as you can give us a holo of the scene."

"I've already sent you some aerials," I say.

"Yeah, they're here on my screen now," she says, "but I want live head."

You and everybody else, I think. "I'll leave my radio open," I say.

This is one of the problems of working as a one man head. In the old days we would go out in pairs. One of us would handle information gathering and link it to the other through our implants. The other would concentrate on image acquisition. Trying to do both at the same time, while fielding calls from some producer who probably never used her implant for anything more stressful than chatting on the telesphere, can be really exhausting.

I find the command post and jack in with the other half dozen journos and holojays who have arrived. I get the initial nugget of information PIO Ramirez has released, but I'm just in time for the man himself. I don my holocam and begin sending data to the storage packets in my vest.

You might wonder about the name. Yes, Ramirez is Mexican by heritage, but his family dates back to nineteenth century California, one of the so-called "Old Families" that were allowed to stay during the purge. That's not to say that he hasn't met his share of discrimination and racism. His wife was actually murdered by Skinheads, and he was beaten and left for dead in the attack. Cops tend to stick together, however, and some of his old Academy buddies hunted them down and killed them. All of them. Now there are no Skinheads left in California; or if there are, they're not letting themselves be seen.

"Well, let's get started," says the PIO. Ramirez likes to take control early, getting his first word out before most of us have our feet under us on the ground. I hear Wendy chirp in my implant that she's taking my head, so I stand very still and focus intently on Ramirez.

"At approximately 2:53 this morning a blast levelled the entire block along 118th Street in the Franklin Heights area. None of the structures in the block survived. We believe an explosive device was planted in the basement of the apartment building that stood at 1104 118th. We have found some survivors, but our initial estimates are 1231 dead, 85 injured. Those are preliminary figures which will be revised throughout the morning.

"We have already received a claim of responsibility from the Texas Liberty Riders. We are tracking several suspects at this time, and we hope to have something more for you later this morning. That's all for right now; I'll have more for you in a couple of hours."

Ramirez quickly disappears into the mobile command post before the assembled journos can hurl too many questions at him. I hear Wendy give me the all clear in my implant.

Suddenly the ground opens up under the command post and flames shoot thirty feet in the air. I'm thrown to the ground by the force of the blast, but I've been doing this long enough that my instincts take over. I keep my head level and storage packets recording. I can hear Wendy screaming in my implant over the ringing in my ears. "What the fuck was that? What's going on? We're taking your head live again now!"

I get to my feet just in time to see...

Eh, maybe I'll finish this. Maybe not.